PERLSTEIN (page 21): Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments. He raged for what he could not have or control. At the age of seven, he so wanted a jar of pollywogs a younger boy had collected from the forbidden canal that he beaned the kid in the head with a toy hatchet (his victim bore the scar for life). He ever felt unfairly put upon: at age ten he wrote a letter to the mother he revered, rendered distant by the raising of four other often-sickly boys, for a school assignment in the voice of a pet. Addressed “My Dear Master,” it spun out fantastic images of unearned persecutions. “The two dogs that you left with me are very bad to me…While going through the woods one of the boys triped [sic] and fell on me...He kiked [sic] me in the side...I wish you could come home right now.” A few months later, he betrayed another foreshadowing trait: groveling to elevate his status in life. “Please consider me for the position of office boy mentioned in the Times paper,” he wrote to the big-city daily his family took and which he devoured, the reactionary Los Angeles Times. “I am eleven years of age...I am willing to come to your office at any time and I will accept any pay offered.”

He contained his raging ambition in the discipline of debate...

When Richard Nixon, just turned 11, tried to get that job at the Times, was he already “groveling to elevate his status in life?” When he wrote that composition at age 10, was he, “a serial collector of resentments,” showing that “he ever felt unfairly put upon?”

Wow! We’d have to say those claims are inane. Inane, and tending toward cruel.

On Saturday, we asked what it means about our culture when an historian is honored for making the types of presentations and claims you see in that cockeyed passage. We think it means something bad.

For what it’s worth, Perlstein’s sourcing of this trio of claims is virtually non-existent. In his 1987 biography of Nixon, Stephen Ambrose presented the full text of the “My Dear Master” composition and of the letter to the Times. According to Ambrose, Nixon’s mother provided both documents to Bela Kornitzer in connection with Kornitzer’s 1960 biography, The Real Nixon.

(Ambrose offers no wild interpretations of the documents. He does say that the “My Dear Master” document was a favorite of Nixon’s “numerous psychobiographers,” who “go to great lengths to analyze its hidden meanings.”)

As best we can tell, Kornitzer’s name isn’t mentioned anywhere in Perlstein’s sourcing. (We’re not saying it should be.) At the start of his Chapter Two, he provides an all-encompassing note citing biographies by Leonard Lurie and Fawn Brodie as the sources readers should see “for Richard Nixon’s early life.”

Through the bulk of his adult life, Lurie was a public school administrator; he also wrote a biography of Nixon in 1972. Brodie wrote a widely-criticized psychobiography of Nixon in 1981. Presumably, Perlstein is adopting the unflattering interpretations presented in those earlier books as he helps us see that Nixon was already nutty at 7. Because of the pollywogs!

What does it mean when our era’s major writers are praised for this kind of work? We’d suggest it means that modern journalistic culture is adopting the norms of the novel—or more accurately, of the cartoon.

In one final post on this topic, we’ll review the crazily unflattering portraits Perlstein drew of each of Nixon’s parents; we’ll struggle to discern the basis on which he felt free to sketch these cartoons. For today, let’s look at the remarkable portrait he draws of the town where Nixon was born—and of the many “godforsaken burgs” where Nixon campaigned for the Senate decades later.

How do we liberals practice to lose? As he starts Chapter Two, Perlstein shows how to create the class resentments Nixon drew upon with great success all through his adult career:

PERLSTEIN (page 20): Chapter Two/The Orthogonian

By 1966 Richard Nixon had been clawing all his life. Whenever a dirty job had to get done, he had been there to do it.

From the time he was a boy in the Southern California citrus groves, staying up half the night to man the creepy little potbellied orchard heaters that kept the frost from the trees but not the black smudge from the boy tending them, to stain his clothes for school the next day; from the time his father built a combination grocery and gas station and made it his second son’s dirty job to begin each day in the dark, at 4 a.m., driving to the Los Angeles market to select the day’s produce; from the time he was denied a chance to go to Harvard because he could only afford to live at home; from the time he was blacklisted from his little local college’s single social club because he was too unpolished; from the time he was reduced to sharing a one-room shack without heat or indoor plumbing while he was working his way through Duke Law School; from the time, finishing third in his class, he trudged frantically from white-shoe Wall Street law firm to white-shoe Wall Street law form and was shown the door at each one (he ended up practicing law back home, where, forced to handle divorce cases, he would stare at his shoes, crimson-red with embarrassment, as women related to him the problems they suffered at the marital bed). To the time, back from the war, he begged Southern California’s penny-ante plutocrats, navy cap in hand, for their sufferance of his first congressional bid; to the time he trundled across California in his wood-paneled station wagon, bringing his Senate campaign into every godforsaken little burg in that state with so many scores of godforsaken little burgs.

The town he was born in, Yorba Linda, was just that sort of godforsaken little burg. Frank Nixon has built a little plaster-frame house there in 1910 across from a cruddy, oversize ditch that must have shaped one of the boy’s earliest indelible impressions of the world.

Was California full of “godforsaken little burgs” when Nixon ran for the Senate in 1950? Had Nixon been born in one of those “godforsaken burgs,” across from a “cruddy” ditch?

As a boy and then as a youth, was Nixon involved in a series of “dirty jobs” as he worked to help his family, even as they lost two of his brothers to childhood diseases? And by the way, in a different vein:

Do you really believe that, as a young lawyer, Nixon “would stare at his shoes, crimson-red with embarrassment,” as women explained the basis for their legal actions? In notes, we looked for a source for that entertaining claim. There is none. But then, these passages are cartoons.

Our view? When “historians” write about dirty jobs in godforsaken burgs, they are teaching us liberals how to lose. Somewhat ironically, they are encouraging liberals to recreate the sense of resentment on which Nixon often drew for his electoral success.

In our mind, it’s a losing game when liberals trade the norms of journalism and scholarship for the culture of cartoonized novels. Later this week, we’ll explain why.

That said, was Nixon crazy at age 7? If he was, Perlstein has no apparent way to know it. But as Nixon knew by the late 1960s, regular voters will always hate the swells who express their contempt for regular people in this ridiculous, sneering manner.

For the record, these same techniques were used against Candidate Gore during Campaign 2000. According to one major journalist, he was a creepy little guy by the age of 6!

This signaled other scribes that it was OK for them to pile on. But then, progressives always stand to lose the most when basic rules and procedures are abandoned in favor of clowning and license.

Did Nixon grow up in a cruddy burg? Let's sneer when we say those things, liberals!

25 comments:

When you've milked this bone dry because, obviously, there's nothing more important than exposing a book written six years ago.

And for his sheep with short memories, this is the same guy who constantly criticizes Rachel Maddow for "teasing" a story she actually gets around to covering in the same hour.

Here's a thought, Bob. Instead of repeating yourself for over a week, why not get down to your point?

In one tightly constructed post, why not tell us why "it’s a losing game when liberals trade the norms of journalism and scholarship for the culture of cartoonized novels" along with more examples of such than the ones that exist in your head about a six-year-old book.

But would that mean you'd have to think up a whole 'nother subject to write about tomorrow? Oh, the horrors!

Well, there is always Tuscaloosa. And 1999. Surely you haven't written enough about how Maureen Dowd and Chris Matthews cost someone's college roomie the election.

I remember back when Nixonland came out Digby still had comments on her blog, and people went nuts if you challenged P on some of these stories. Especially P.!

His depiction of post-1969 life bore no resemblance to anything I saw, and yet, his version of those years is key to his revisionist outlook that the Left was a failure back then, and that the country was still full of reactionary Neanderthals who never-- apparently-- changed.

Al Gore probably was a creepy little guy at age 6. He was certainly a creepy guy when I first laid eyes on him when he tried to present himself as the conservative "southern" candidate for President in 1988.

And, when Dick Nixon was a little boy, Yorba Linda, population about 300, was indeed a burg.

Whittier and Yorba Linda were actually quite nice and affluent communities back then. Still are. Back then Whittier was kind of the Woodland Hills of Los Angeles. It was a distant suburb, but nice.

Southern California too was quite the paradise then. Especially the San Gabriel Valley.

Perlstein's so wrong here it's not funny. Besides, don't most of his better insights come from Gary Wills (who? I can hear the gallery asking...) The Orthogonian thing is right from his 1970 book-- not Perlstein.

Reading again about Nixon's humble beginnings and the effort he made to rise makes me admire him all over again and to feel sad that his fatal flaws brought down everything he worked so hard to achieve. he was much above-average in foreign policy and was so liberal on the domestic side that the Tea Party would call him a fascist/communist/socialist like Obama. He was going to crush Senator McGovern and certainly didn't need the Watergate burglary to prevail.

If Nixon tended orange trees the ditch may have been for irrigation or run-off. No one thought they were cruddy (and I lived in Whittier during that time period). IIRC his older brother died of TB. That required his mother to nurse him for a long time while keeping herself and his brother away from the rest of the family.

Fawn Brodie's bio was written hastily as she was dying of cancer. She refused treatment to finish it. She hated Nixon and the book is a hit piece and not up to the standard of her excellent previous bios.

Ah, how much is one of probably hundreds of books written about Nixon going to effect the way liberals are regarded by conservatives? This month we learned pretty definitively that Richard Nixon tampered with the Paris Peace talks. This bombshell, long considered partisan gossip or "conspiracy theory" should give pause to decent people of all political stripes. It's interesting, actually, that Bob picks this moment to go back and settle an old score about a bad Nixon book. 40,000 more Americans would die on Nixon's watch in Vietnam. How is the press handling this revaluation? Wait, first we must deal with this old Nixon book. By way of lighting a match in this darkness I will recommend Garry Wills "Nixon Agonistes" a classic and still the best book on Nixon.

As for humble beginnings, being in the 99% today is a lot better than it was 100 years ago. Nixon's circumstances were probably about middling for the time, as were those of my grandfather, who in 1939 declared an annual income of $480 as a 40-year-old sharecropper.

As I settle into the age of reflection, the more shocked and discouraged I become to realize how little I've changed from 7-year-old, or the 11-year-old, I used to be.